America in Revolt: The Art of Protest, at Shapero Modern, London, England. February 3 to 27, 2016

Abstract

The recent exhibition America in Revolt: The Art of Protest at Shapero Modern, a new gallery venture by the London bookseller Shapero Rare Books, featured fifty original posters and artwork produced by students and activists of the radical Political Poster Workshop at UC Berkeley during the early 1970s. The works were drawn from the private collection, recently acquired by Shapero Rare Books, of the late British publisher and philanthropist Felix Dennis, best known for his involvement in the notorious 1960s underground magazine Oz. The posters were the result of spontaneous grassroots activism by trained designers and amateurs. The catalyst, as activist Jay Belloli has recently recalled, was the anger at the spread of the Vietnam War to Cambodia and the shooting of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970. Working rapidly and collectively, directly silk-screening on to waste computer